A Different Valinor
by Flame Tigress
Summary: "But if your hurts grieve you still..." If Arwen had not gifted Frodo with admission into the West, perhaps he would have ended the pain that plagued him in Middle-earth with a different escape: death. Grim, angsty, and somewhat messy; AU.


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Disclaimer: You didn't actually think I wrote _The Lord of the Rings, _did you? I wish I had…

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Author's Note: As Aunt Alexandra from _To Kill a Mockingbird_ would say, I have a morbid streak. About a mile wide. Along with my cynical streak, my angsty streak, my villain-sympathizing streak, my humorous streak, my poetic streak, my screaming Elijah-crazy fangirl streak, my perverted streak – oops, you haven't seen that one yet…

Back to the morbid streak – I like killing people. If it isn't messy and painful, it has to be melodramatic – or all three. This falls under the categories of both "messy" and "melodramatic." (For more examples of my disturbing penchant for the macabre, see "'Samwise Gamgee and the Ring'" or "The Dark Lord's Armageddon," the latter of which is actually a _Harry Potter_-based fic.) The idea for this came from my analysis of _The Lord of the Rings, _stubbornly looking for symbolism and allegory, however adamantly Tolkien insisted it wasn't there. Valinor, obviously, is symbolic of Heaven; my mother, therefore, asserted that Frodo's permanent departure to the West – complete with healing of all wounds and relief from all spiritual pain – was his "death" to Middle-earth, although a little kinder and gentler, as he was actually still alive. So, if Arwen had not bestowed upon Frodo the gift of her place in the Blessed Realm if his wounds still pained him, perhaps he would have made a different sort of sacrifice, and for a different "Valinor" left his friends, possibly eternally, to heal.

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A Different Valinor

When Sam found him, Frodo was crumpled on the floor with Sting's blade embedded deeply in his bare chest. His hands gripped the hilt at arm's length, and blood pooled around his still form and stained his pale skin red.

Sam stood stunned for a moment when he first entered the silent room, his face a mask of shock, horror, and anguish, as though he had suddenly been stabbed from behind. Then he rushed forward with an agonized cry, his hoarse voice sounding as though torn and bleeding. He fell to his knees, ragged, despairing, heartbroken, sobs racking his body. Desperately he clutched at his master's still barely warm shoulder, stroked his dark hair, brushed his fingers over half-closed eyelids beneath which sky-blue eyes still shone like pools frozen over with a sheet of winter ice.

Hearing her husband's cry, Rosie came rushing in, calling, "What's the matter?" with little Elanor clutching at her skirts. Upon entering the room and taking in the horrific scene before her, Rosie immediately turned Elanor's face into her apron and covered her daughter's eyes with her hand. Tears starting in Rose's eyes, she put her hand over her mouth; silent sobs shook within her.

Sam, unaware of his wife and daughter's presence, could see nothing, could think of nothing but the image behind his closed eyelids of the true vision he had beheld in the Mirror of Galadriel – of Frodo lying still and pale beneath a dark cliff. Sam could think of nothing but the sight he had thought would be his last of his beloved master: Frodo's fair face haloed in glowing white, moon-like elvish beauty beneath the luminescence of the Galadriel's star-phial, the only light in a dark, unholy land. He had not been dead then, Sam's heart had known and had whispered this hope softly to him against the weighty voice of reason; but no such whisper echoed in Sam's spirit now. Tears streaming freely down his face, Sam opened his eyes to what he so desperately did not want to see, and so fervently wished was only a nightmare. 

Still the morning sun poured in through the window that overlooked the garden, its honeyed light mockingly cheerful, upon the unmoving, broken figure ringed by its pool of blood in a gruesome, macabre aura of vivid scarlet.

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Frodo rested his elbows on his desk and his forehead in a brace formed by his fingers, staring down at the paper in front of him. His suicide note, it was surreal to think. There was far too much to say in one short letter; it would take a lifetime for Frodo to write every word that he needed to explain to the person dearest to him why, when he woke in the morning, he would find out that he would never see Frodo alive again, never hear him speak again. It would take all the paper and ink in the world to write every word of comfort, heartening, and love that Frodo wanted to impart – but the letter could never say enough. Frodo sighed and bit his lip, still gazing at the parchment.

Dear Sam,

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was all it said.

It was all Frodo could think to say.

He raised his eyes to gaze through the – incomplete – latticework formed by his fingers across his brow. He could see the late-blooming autumn flowers and vegetables in Sam's garden outside, though most of the flora was sleeping, as it was already early October. Beyond the garden, the Shire was painted with flaming golden and red, burning in the merry bonfire created by Nature's autumn palette under the rosy light of the fast-fading crimson sunset in the west. It was beautiful, he mused detachedly. So beautiful.

And yet it held nothing for him anymore. Frodo watched the dim reddish light of the sinking sun vanish into a golden coronet over the expanse of peaceful, bountiful farmland; watched the bright hue of the blue sky deepen to the color of night; watched the violet clouds fade into soft patches in a field of dark; watched the faint silvery ghost of the moon brighten into an oval of snow-white luminescence, and the twinkling scattering of stars burn their pinpoints of light like candles through a blue-black haze. So beautiful it hurt – or perhaps the hurt came from somewhere else; perhaps it hurt because nightfall over the Shire was no longer beautiful. Not to Frodo.

But Sam still loved it; still his heart lay with the slumbering roses and the blossoming chrysanthemums, with the new-harvested corn and the sun on the wheat fields, with the feel of life-giving earth beneath his callused, caring fingers, and the promise of roses again in the garden, come spring.

Suddenly, Frodo knew what to write. Taking his quill pen from its simple ceramic inkwell, he began filling in the blank page.

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Sam sat in stony silence beside his master's lifeless body lying fully-clothed, as if simply taking a midday rest, on his bed. The afternoon sun shone in slantwise through the thin veil of the curtains half-closed across the window that faced west. The floor beneath the window and beside the paper-littered desk had a reddish stain that could not be scrubbed from the wood, despite hours of arduous trying and raw palms and knuckles for Rosie. Sam had washed the blood from Frodo's chest and arms and bound the gaping, still sluggishly bleeding wound gouged in his breast, and then gone outside into the garden and vomited, ill from the overpowering, metallic, salty-sweet stench of his dearest friend's lifeblood poured from his body.

Sam knew he would have to tell Merry and Pippin somehow; all the members of the Fellowship would have to know. Funeral and burial would have to be arranged and taken care of. Death could not be left to emotion and grief – there were duties and responsibilities that came with the death of a loved one, and personal grieving had to be put aside at some time.

But now, in the mostly-clean, quiet, sunlit room, Sam could not tear his gaze away from Frodo's face; his features looked as though chiseled by an expert hand in snow-white marble, immaculate and pale as moonlight. It was the second time Frodo had been dead, the second time he had lain utterly still with neither breath nor heartbeat a flutter in his breast; the second time Sam had fleetingly considered plunging Sting's gleaming point into his own breast…but had realized that it would solve nothing. Instead he simply took Frodo's cold, limp hand in his own, raised it to his lips, and kissed the stump of a third finger. He had done the same two-and-a-half years before, he remembered, at the top of Mount Doom as the world seemed to be belching fire, smoke, heat, and roaring noise – but the two small, solitary hobbits sitting together and waiting for death to come over them there together didn't mind. They were together, and that was enough. The taste of Frodo's blood on Sam's lips had been the warm, bittersweet tang of empathy, compassion, and love.

It was too cold, now, and all blood had been shed.

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Frodo remembered standing like this before a mirror in Rivendell, very normally buttoning his shirt, but with something not normal – perhaps the numb clumsiness of his left hand; perhaps the thinness and pallor of the fair-skinned face reflected in the glass; perhaps the haunted, pained, no-longer-naïve solemnity of the wide blue eyes gazing back at him, not quite hollow, but neither quite as bright and jovial as they had once been.

Now, instead, he unbuttoned his shirt to reveal a white scar in the shape of a ring located on his breastbone just below the meeting of his first ribs. It appeared on his skin, yes, but it was more truly on his heart – if that scar was engraved, a ring of half-healed tissue, straight into the core of his being, perhaps it would be visible as deep as it was felt. The Ring still burned sometimes, somewhere too deep in Frodo's being to be soothed by the cooling salves of home and friendship and peace. What frightened him was that he felt a need and hunger for its fire to fill the emptiness that the Ring had burned into his soul when it had scoured away his memories, leaving him with 'no taste of food, no feel of water, no sound of wind, no memory of tree or grass or flower, no image of moon or star'… Such images had returned to fill the void purged by the Ring of Power, but still a hole had been left – something missing – what was it? The feeling of being completely happy, completely unafraid? A time when he did not know what emptiness was, or vulnerable, coldly burning nakedness in the dark?

Slowly, Frodo unbuttoned and removed his vest, his left hand shaking and numb as it was every October 6. His shirt, also, he tremulously opened and pulled over his head, abandoning the clean white linen garment on the floor. His entire left side ached, and he shivered with a chill he alone could feel on the unusually warm autumn night, as though feverish. There was a linear scar below his left shoulder, milky-white like the Ring-print on his breastbone; another scar, a spidery star-shaped spider's sting, marked the back of his neck. Gazing into the mirror, he raised his hands to throat-level and studied the maimed stump of a third finger on his right hand. It was covered by an uneven mass of pale scar tissue. The marks of his physical wounds – it was easier to tell when they still pained him than with the wounds on his soul; often, that was a steady ache that did not attack particularly on anniversaries.

Why? Frodo wondered, struck with the question as though it had never before occurred to him, though he had pondered and agonized over it many times. Why did it come to me? Why was I chosen? I was so content, so ordinary – why me in particular? Why was no other hobbit forced to leave his home following a nearly hopeless quest not really his; wounded, doomed never to fully heal; destined to suffer so deeply that warriors look at him with pity in their eyes? Why my_ shoulder, _my_ neck, _my _finger, _my_ breast, _my_ heart? Why, now, _my_ life?_

Too deeply hurt, Frodo thought. I have been too deeply hurt, for my wounds pain me still, and the pain will never leave. Not here. That cannot be a shadow forever on my life, a life that might have been happy…but was given a different doom when Bilbo made me his heir – or when he found the Ring in Gollum's cave. Or perhaps when Déagol found it and Sméagol coveted it; perhaps when Isildur could not destroy it; perhaps when Sauron forged it…perhaps when the world was made and the stars aligned, and all fates decided.

"I am sorry, Sam," Frodo whispered, barely audible to the stillness of the candle-lit room, as he took Sting from where it lay ready on his bed. "I am sorry; but all right choices must come with regrets. I regret losing you, but my heart tells me this choice is right…I only hope it speaks truly." Sighing, Frodo slid the gleaming, rune-engraved blade from its sheath and cast the leather scabbard to the floor. Studying his own sorrowful, pool-like eyes in the mirror, Frodo felt for his heartbeat beneath his half-cold, half-burning, pale flesh and easily palpable ribs; there it was, just left of his center – caught between the mark of the Ring-pendant's presence and the scar left by the piercing of the Morgul-knife. His arms at full length to clasp the hilt and his back hunched to allow for the sword's length, he rested Sting's needle-like tip at the point between two ribs beneath which his heart lay; the slight touch of the blade, not dulled by time because of its perfect elven make, drew a few drops of bright red blood. Frodo did not fear what moment's pain may come as the blade pierced through flesh, for a deeper pain would end forever, nevermore to eat at his soul.

Closing his eyes, Frodo fell forward; as though in half a dream, half a memory, like scenes of his life passing before his eyes, he saw, as he had seen before in the house of Tom Bombadil, in his own eyelids before him a curtain of gray rain. Penetrated by the starlight of sweet singing echoing only in his own ears, the veil of melancholy mist turned to glimmering silver-clear glass and rolled away to unveil a shining white shore and tranquil, bright green lands beyond.

Over these lands the sun did not set, but rose to soar in the dawn.

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Sam had not seen the letter before; it was folded, and lying among the many papers – ancient Elvish manuscripts, or discarded versions of the tale in the now-finished Red Book – that were always scattered about the surface of Frodo's desk. Orderliness had not been among Frodo's numerous scholarly talents, Sam remembered, every random piece of fond nostalgia a sharp, wistful pain. But _"Sam" _was written plainly on the outside of this folded leaf of parchment in Frodo's flowing, graceful script – a grace he had regained even after the loss of a finger on his pen hand.

His hands shaking, Sam slowly, unsteadily unfolded the letter to read the last thing his friend had to say to him.

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Dear Sam,

I know that you thought I would stay and enjoy the Shire for years after all I have done for it. So I thought, too, once. But I have been too deeply hurt, Sam. I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them. But you are my heir: all that I had and might have had I leave to you. And also you have Rose, and Elanor; and Frodo-lad will come, and Rosie-lass, and Merry, and Goldilocks, and Pippin; and perhaps more that I cannot see. Your hands and your wits will be needed everywhere. You will be the Mayor, of course, as long as you want to be, and the most famous gardener in history; and you will read things out of the Red Book, and keep alive the memory of the age that is gone, so that people will remember the Great Danger and so love their beloved land all the more. And that will keep you as busy and as happy as anyone can be, as long as your part of the Story goes on.

Do not be too sad, Sam. You cannot be always torn in two. You will have to be one and whole, for many years. You have so much to enjoy and to be, and to do.

With all the love I hold in my heart,

Frodo

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Author's Note: The suicide note – the core of the story, really – comes from Frodo's farewell speech when Sam figures out that Frodo is leaving permanently for the West in the chapter in _The Return of the King_ entitled "The Grey Havens"; page numbers vary between publications.

My, but that was grim! I'm going to steer clear of angst for a while now…I think I've gone off the deep end. The next story I'm posting is entitled "Gandalf the Grey Woke Up Gay." Nice, cheerful, bloodless if not entirely clean ficlet. Do visit my other _Lord of the Rings_ (or _Harry Potter_) fics while you're in the neighborhood; fans of hobbit-angst will not be disappointed with such feats of emotional writing as "Remember Me," "'Samwise Gamgee and the Ring,'" "Drowning Alone," "Pity," "Though I Do Not Know the Way" (my personal favorite and most recommended because it's funny _and _angsty), and "Last of the Ring-bearers." I sound like a corny advertising narrator, but I assure you, my voice isn't half as syrupy and annoying. I NEED REVIEWS because they boost my pathetic self-esteem and give me a warm, fuzzy feeling inside…


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